But we must be careful how we compare our forefathers with these, or
any other savages. Those who, like Gibbon, have tried to draw a
parallel between the Red Indian and the Primaeval Teuton, have done
so at the expense of facts. First, they have overlooked the broad
fact, that while the Red Indians have been, ever since we have known
them, a decreasing race, the Teutons have been a rapidly increasing
one; in spite of war, and famine, and all the ills of a precarious
forest life, proving their youthful strength and vitality by a
reproduction unparalleled, as far as I know, in history, save perhaps
by that noble and young race, the Russian. These writers have not
known that the Teuton had his definite laws, more simple, doubtless,
in the time of Tacitus than in that of Justinian, but still founded
on abstract principles so deep and broad that they form the
groundwork of our English laws and constitution; that the Teuton
creed concerning the unseen world, and divine beings, was of a
loftiness and purity as far above the silly legends of Hiawatha as
the Teuton morals were above those of a Sioux or a Comanche. Let any
one read honest accounts of the Red Indians; let him read Catlin,
James, Lewis and Clarke, Shoolbred; and first and best of all, the
old 'Travaile in Virginia,' published by the Hakluyt Society: and
then let him read the Germania of Tacitus, and judge for himself.
For my part, I believe that if Gibbon was right, and if our
forefathers in the German forests had been like Powhattan's people as
we found them in the Virginian forests, the Romans would not have
been long in civilizing us off the face of the earth.

No. All the notes which Tacitus gives us are notes of a young and
strong race; unconscious of its own capabilities, but possessing such
capabilities that the observant Romans saw at once with dread and awe